By Mike Corrigan

BN Columnist

Dad’s generation beat the Germans and the Japanese. My father had it easy, winning that war, with all the help he got in men and materiel. 

I, on the other hand, was later chosen to single-handedly beat the Russians.

When I got the first hint of my assignment, it was October of 1957. I remember, a chill and windy day, and the season’s first leaves were falling in the valley of the Androscoggin. 

“Do any of you know what Sputnik is?” my fifth-grade teacher, Miss Dancoes, asked. Inside my head it was still summer. Somebody more alert than I was insisted that Sputnik was that rocket the Russians had sent up into space the day before. “Yes, well, a satellite carried aloft by a rocket,” the teacher said. “Just like the moon is a satellite. In fact, Sputnik means ‘Little Moon.’”

Why don’t we just call it ‘Little Moon’ then? my head thought. Inside that windy cavern, autumn began to send its frosty little inchlings out from some central Frigidaire. 

“It’s up there, orbiting the Earth right now, Sputnik, beeping away,” Miss Dancoes said, pointing vaguely at the ceiling. It being the Fifties, everyone in class beeped away dutifully and pointed at the ceiling too, in order to demonstrate that we knew exactly what beeping and pointing at the ceiling meant. We might qualify as little moons!

“And now… you,” she said, quieting the class with one hand while pointing a bony digit on her other hand directly at me, “now you will have to study harder, and invent better planes and bigger rockets and faster bombs. They’re ahead of us! The Russians! We have to catch up to the Russians!”

Inside my head, it began to snow.

Within a few months, high school curricula changed, emphasizing science and mathematics and new and improved Russian-hating — although Little Ivan was given credit for doing more with less than Little Johnny, who famously couldn’t read, according to a certain Rudolf Flesch, Mr. Phonics himself. 

By that time, I had figured out that it wasn’t my duty to beat the Russians: my whole generation had been charged with this awesome civic responsibility — and most of us hadn’t even heard of algebra yet! (And then, when we finally did get to Algebra class, we were asked to solve non-Sputnik-type problems that began: “If an eastbound train leaves Indianapolis at noon, traveling 40 miles an hour, and a westbound train leaves New York City one hour later, going 50 miles an hour, what ratio of walnuts to peanuts would bring the price per pound to $1.89?” What American nuts and timetables had to do with beating the Soviets to the Moon I never found out. About all I learned was that nuts were cheaper in those days.)

Still, as that year went on, we American schoolchildren were loaded with more and more responsibility for the future of democracy in outer space. As rocket after rocket blew up on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral, or rose listlessly a few feet into the air, tipped slowly sideways and blew up, or rose confidently to a height many yards above the earth, and then canted slightly, and then canted even more convincingly, and then yawed, and twirled away erratically sideways, and then exploded like the Fourth of July, my classmates and I grew even more and more depressed. 

“Another failure,” the TV announcer intoned severely, and after the first half dozen or so reports, more or less snidely. Through November and December, the television announcer pointed directly at me and said: “Here we go again. Another failure. You kids are falling way behind the Russians now. Yesterday, the Soviets sent a dog into orbit. A dog! A little doggie beat you guys into space! Laika’s up there now, looking for a place to make wee. And what are you doing, to save your country? Come on, be a man! Crack those books! Practice quadratic equations in your spare time!”

It was all a false alarm, of course. By the time I got to high school, it had been revealed that the Russians hadn’t beaten the Americans into space, after all. No, the Soviets’ captured Nazi mad scientists had beaten the Americans’ captured Nazi mad scientists into space. And, even worse, those rockets that both teams of insane mathematicians had built to send things into orbit had been perfected and adapted to haul nuclear weapons up there with them, which could then be calibrated to dependably come back down on Moscow or Louisville or Vladivostok or Baton Rouge, though why anyone in his right mind would want to do that, everyone forgot to ask. 

So, now it turned out we were all going to die again, even more surely and completely than ever, so what was the point of studying math? With that fatalistic realization, my generation turned, more or less en masse to drugs, sex and rock ’n roll. In my case, one out of three had to do for a long while, but even then, when Al Mac asked me in the summer of ’69 if I was going to Woodstock, I had to admit I had never heard of it, so it was basically zero out of three for Mikey there in Squaresville. All sorts of good things had been scheduled for some New York field, Al said, but for me it seemed a long way to hitchhike and, besides, it looked like rain.

Electronic communications moved slowly in the valley of the Androscoggin. And, I was behind the times. I continued wandering around from enthusiasm to enthusiasm, accomplishing little. Finally, with no help at all from me, Reagan America finally beat the Russians by outspending them. So, we basically won the Cold War by shopping. 

One more guilt trip, wasted. Had ’em all the way.

Mike Corrigan was a long-time writer and editor of The Bridgton News. He won numerous Maine Press Association Better Newspaper Contest awards for column writing.